As such, it is the most cynical betrayal of those who are disenfranchised. It confirms that they have no part in real political processes; they can only choose their monarch... The politics of mass democracy has failed. It has been narrowed down to a mechanism for managing large-scale interests in response to explicit and implicit lobbying by fabulously well-resourced commercial and financial concerns... For significant parts of a population, “theatrical” politics comes to look like the only option: a dramatic articulation of the problems of powerlessness, for which the exact details of economic or social reality are irrelevant. This delivers people into the hands of another kind of dishonest politics: the fact-free manipulation of emotion by populist adventurers."
A counter-view from Sam Kriss that goes back to Plato to examine the inherent theatricality of politics and how we've always been "post-truth" (Slate) :
"... in The Laws, Plato describes Athenian democracy as “wretched theatrokratia,” rule by the theater, a society on the precipice of tyranny... Science is a discourse in which the categories of truth or falsehood make sense; aesthetics is one in which they don’t. Politics is something strange, however: It’s far closer to literature than it is to science—disagreements over political principle can’t be settled through a practical experiment... the power offered by politics is always the power to imagine something unreal. You can dream of (for instance) a National Health Service, or an end to all war, or the liberation of women. You can dream of things that don’t yet exist and are by any binary definition untrue and then begin to bring them into being.... It’s not that facts aren’t good for anything, but a politics consisting of facts and nothing else isn’t politics, but management. This is what our politics are actually turning into: rule by experts and fatalism....Politics is where people can gain the ability to actively reshape the world, rather than just describe it. It’s as false as the Athenian theater, and this is no bad thing. Of course these aspects of politics can give rise to monsters like Donald Trump; dreams always raise the possibility of a nightmare.... "
“If Trump is possible, then everything is possible... As for Le Pen it is unlikely that she wins but it is possible, and that is partly because the people have lost interest in policy, instead focusing on personality.... they even seem less concerned about whether the candidates are telling the truth or not. They are more interested in the performance, in the theatrical quality of what is said than whether it is true. And as we know, a fascist can put on a very successful performance.”
c.f.
the famous clash between George W. Bush aide versus Ron Suskind: History's actors versus the reality-based community with their judicious study of discernible reality, the expert sifting of facts and data
Trump as Roman Emperor and maestro of "crass showmanship" as the new political norm -
Katy Waldman at Slate
"He is America’s capricious kingmaker, the impish, omnipotent ringmaster of a grand circus in which he’s taming CEOs and the liberal media and Mexico and Mitt Romney and lions—big, beautiful lions—in all five rings simultaneously. The changing weather of Donald Trump’s temperament and his thrilling and sinister ability to enact his fitful will—these are the themes of a mass entertainment that has taken the place of traditional presidential politics. “One of the announcers, I have to tell you, from ESPN,” Trump told his followers on Thursday night, “he said, ‘That [election night] was the most exciting event I’ve ever seen.’ ” Every time Trump injects chaos into the system or subverts our expectations, he makes the spectacle better, and America worse."
and my article on Glam / Trump parallels
(director's cut of piece published in The Guardian, October 14th 2016)
When I was writing my new glam rock history Shock and Awe, I kept running into things that seemed like premonitions – previews of the scary and dangerous man running for the American presidency right now.
In his mid-Seventies interviews, David Bowie kept talking -- in an unnervingly fixated way --about “a strong leader” destined to “sweep through” the Western World: a charismatic superhero who might emerge not from conventional politics but from the entertainment field. Sometimes Bowie’s tone was ominous and fatalistic, as if this scenario was inevitable. At other times, he’d make it seem like a necessary corrective to a Weimar-style state of decadence, talking with seemingly approving anticipation of “a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny” that would clean up all the mess made by the permissive society.
At his most extreme, unguarded and cocaine-addled, Bowie proposed himself as a candidate for the job, whether as British PM, as the “first English president of the United States,” or maybe even as ruler of the world.
Another future-spectre of Trump was Alice Cooper’s pretend run for the presidency in 1972. It took the form of the single “Elected” and its hilarious, delirious video but nonetheless had a curiously convincing tone of megalomaniacal demagoguery about it, as Cooper boasted that he and his “young and strong” followers would take “the country by storm.”
On the surface, Donald Trump and the glam era’s stars couldn’t be further apart. What does Trump have in common with Ziggy Stardust, apart from orange hair? The Donald is a bigot, a macho bully, a philistine, a proud ignoramus. Bowie and the brightest of his peers were androgynous aesthetes, intellectually hungry and sexually experimental.
And yet there are some unlikely affinities. As signaled by his gilded tower on 5th Avenue, Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and the glam rockers likewise shared an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention. Trump actually plays “We Are the Champions” by Queen (a band aligned with glam in its early days) at his rallies, because its triumphalist refrain “no time for losers” crystallises his Economic Darwinist worldview.
A mirror of oligopoly capitalism, pop is a ferociously competitive game that sorts the contestants into a handful of winners and a greater number of losers. Propelled by a stardom-at-all-costs drive, many of the principal characters in Shock and Awe - Bowie, Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper, Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, Bryan Ferry –nimbly reinvented themselves and in some cases trampled people on their way up. They willed their fantasy-selves into existence. This same ethos of “don’t dream it, be it” (as articulated by The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Dr Frank-N-Furter) could be seen in the type of fandom that glam inspired. It had an imitative quality never really seen before in pop: audiences dressing up like the star, copying the hair and make-up. For instance, Roxy Music’s fans - responding to the sophistication of the group’s image and artwork, to audience-flattering lyrical winks such as “sure to make the cognoscenti think” - costumed themselves as members of a make-believe aristocracy. Ferry recalled how some of their Northern followers would turn up to the shows in full black tie, as if attending the Academy Awards ceremony.
Trump’s appeal is generally seen in terms of his doom-laden imagery of a weakened, rudderless America. But there is clearly something else going on too: an admiring projection towards a swaggering figure who revels in his wealth and entitlement, who’s free to do and say whatever he wants. Even the sexual predator boasts caught on the Access Hollywood tape - “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything” - sound uncomfortably close to the rock star / rap star fantasies of freedom and power that are so alluring to so many. Truth is, Tump is an aspirational figure as much as he’s a mouthpiece for resentment and rancor.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of The Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” He and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole.” That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: by making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. As the American saying goes, fake it ‘til you make it. Bowie’s manager Tony Defries used this technique to break the singer in America: travelling everywhere in a limo, surrounded by bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t yet, until the public and the media started to take the illusion for reality.
Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand. As commentators have noticed, banks see him as a promoter rather than a CEO: licensed out, the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn’t own, let alone run. He’s an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a “glamour stock”: an investment that outperforms the market based on an inflated belief in its future growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool and buzz. Twitter has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money. A glamour stock is a self-fulfilling prophecy initially: a magic trick of confidence, its wins because everyone believes it’s going to win. A glamour stock will keep on winning right up until it loses: when the gulf between its perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge, when reality finally disrupts the reality-distortion field surrounding it.
Self-reinvention was the strategy used by glam stars like Bowie and Bolan. You can see the same chameleonic flexibility at work in Trump’s career. Once upon a time he was a Democrat, on genial terms with the Clintons. Years ago he used Birtherism as the launch pad for a political career; now he’s dropped it as a political liability. Same with his recent rabble-rousing rhetoric about building a Wall. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer analyses the agility with which Trump evades attacks by discarding ideas: “He merely creates new Trumps.” That sounds eerily like the way Bowie conjured up new personas to stay one step ahead of pop’s fickle fluctuations and keep himself creatively stimulated. With no fixed political principles, Trump’s only consistency is salesmanship and showmanship: the ability to stage his public life as a drama.
And it’s the drama that holds the public’s attention – the edgy promise of a less boring politics. The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with the idea of voting for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Emerging after the earnest, authenticity-obsessed late Sixties, glam was a period in which rock rediscovered a sense of showbiz and spectacle. Pop history has repeatedly cycled through such phases of glam and anti-glam: Bowie/Roxy razzle-dazzle was supplanted by scruffy pub rock and street-credible punk, which in turn was eclipsed by the neo-glam of the New Romantics. A similar shift occurred in America when glitzy hair metal was displaced by grunge’s mud-slide sound and earth-toned clothes.
Strangely, you can see similar dynamics at play in contemporary politics. Hilary Clinton sits squarely in the unglam corner: a worthy but dull public servant, supremely accomplished at everything required of a politician and leader except what the public perversely craves - being an entertainer. Hilary is the American political equivalent of a “value stock” – those dowdy companies that over time doggedly outperform the glamour stocks, but simply don’t inspire spasms of irrational exuberance in the markets.
The real anti-glam leader of our age, though, is Jeremy Corbyn. Bearded and low-key, he’s the UK politics equivalent of Whispering Bob Harris, the presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test - who couldn’t hide his distaste when visually flashy, image-over-substance bands like Roxy Music, Sparks, and New York Dolls appeared on the program. Corbyn is viscerally opposed to – and fundamentally incapable of – political theater, the very thing that has carried Trump so close to the White House. Corbyn tried to change the format and feel of Prime Minister’s Questions, saying that he wished to “remove the theatre from politics”. In one particular PMQ, he responded to Cameron’s slick pre-scripted gags with the schoolmasterly reprimand “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality.”
Oratory is not Corbyn’s strong suit: he seems instinctively averse to all those elements of spoken language - cadence, musicality of utterance, metaphor – that sway the listener irrationally, bypassing the faculty of judgement. But as Gary Younge argued recently, Corbyn’s plain-spoken delivery is taken as a token of sincerity by his following, who “have not come to be entertained; they have come.... to have a basic sense of decency reflected back to them through their politics.”
This is how a personality cult has built up around Corbyn, despite his honest and accurate admission that "I'm not a personality.” It’s very indie, very alternative rock, the way that the absence of charisma has become the source of a curious magnetism. But as with a taste for indie’s lack of showy drama, it takes a refined sensibility to see past the surface appearance. The general public want a leader to look like a leader. The performance of a public image is considered as important as the actual job performance.
Once in a blue moon, a politician comes along who combines pop star allure and all the less glamorous qualifications like temperament, competence, and knowledge. Obama has both kinds of cool going for him: perfect comic timing at the White House Correspondents Dinner, calmness and clarity during moments of Oval Office crisis. Politics without any element of charisma is certainly a dry affair. But the cult of personality can be dangerous outside the realm of showbiz, its proper domain.
“I could see how easy it was to get a whole rally thing going,” Bowie said in 1974, recalling the height of Ziggymania in Britain a few years earlier. “There were times when I could have told the audience to do anything.” In another interview of that era, Bowie spoke with seeming admiration for the way Hitler “staged a country”, combining “politics and theatrics” to create the ultimate spectacle. “Boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience... [Hitler] created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like.” Fingers crossed, the Trump show gets cancelled next month.
Glamour, noun – 1. (archaic) visual illusion, a magical haze in the air causing things to appear different from how they really are (as in “cast the glamour”). Etymology: Scottish, variant of Scottish gramayre, “magic, enchantment, spell”.
